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I remember this, watching it over and over again. The party 5 demo competion winner. Superb score by dune. Moody as hell. Great underwater effects, butterflies, underwater lightning. All perfectly designed.
Tp5 had a lot of great demos, everyone at the party place was blown away watching all the good entries.

Completely agree. This demo was one of the first "big" 3D shows (which always win TP, you know :), and a really good one. Cool design, athmospheric and moody music by Dune, and great transitions. Worth seeing :)

Bloody awesome. Blew me (and the competition, let's not forget those poor saps) away at tp5 -which was a terrible party if it wasn't for some of the releases, Caero included. Great music, pretty scenes (okay, they were bloody fantastic -especially the fish) and I liked the ending (which was mistaken for a bug by some people)

Should probably be Plant & EMF, but, whatever. The music is an FSOL-imitation, but I really like it. The scenes were awe-inspiring for the time. It still has much more of an "atmosphere" to it than most 3D shows today.

damn yes, this one was really impressive those days, i remember the polygon filler was a bit buggy and produced white lines on some polygon outlines but hell, this one has a great atmosphere (and this error was common ;P ).
The music rocks as well

I haven't seen this demo since it was new.. but remember I liked it a lot. I remembered this as being by EMF as well (I was a fan of the stuff saracen was doing at the time.. I like the intro "Porno" at the time :)).

I would put on my earphones, close my eyes, and enter the waterworld, the virus world, the butterflies, everything. And when it ended, again, and again, and again until I would fall asleep on my chair. Awesome.

One those demos that just stuck. This was one of my top 3 demos for a very very long time. It has the atmospheric impression which just stuck on you - and the soundtrack of course is so brilliant that it hurts.

OOOOHH, I had almost forgotten about this one.
I remember getting the chills and getting fukkin blown away watching this at TP5.
The music is so faachin great. Nobody beats the DUNE!!!! 10 POINTS!!! Where are the hearts???

fhaaakk...already thumbed this up :)
well anyway, fuck future crew and their desert dream remake on the peze....THIS PROD is when I first started to respect the peze scene.....80% is because of the awesome track....

Though many 3D rendered demos got outdated fairly quickly due to the rapid increase of hardware power during the 90s, Caero indeed is one of the special ones that managed to retain its beauty. Partially of course that is also due to the beautiful 2D effect work and graphics, but nevertheless.

The 3D hits the sweet spot of the era; not too many textures, perfect muted color palettes, just enough polygons, no too complex models. There is enough details right where it needs to be, and not too much anywhere else. Even the texture mapping which lacks perspective correction gives an amazing disoriented feeling to some of the camera spins. The cameras and overall direction give quite a similar to certain video tapes put out for an example by Warp Records in the early-mid 90s. Everything within each scene just melds together beautifully.

The theme of the demo is obvious. It's about evolution. We depart from precambrian oceans with a quick gander to the first cell divisions and finally arrive to the first bacteria and other simple organisms. With a swift transition we skip the cambrian explosion, now fish inhabit the oceans. This is probably the only weaker part of the demo for me, since the soundtrack doesn't feel quite so coherent here. A brief look into early life above water is also seen.

I'm not sure if these evolutionary events are taking place on earth though. The whole demo has a very eery otherworldly feeling, largely set by the supreme music by Dune. The scene with the butterflies is perhaps my favorite in the entire demo. I love the grey murky sky that encapsulates the world. It's barren yet feels so alive, perfectly supported by the somber chords of the soundtrack. Then there is of course the the part with the pillars and the lights flying about, which further implies the mystique around this realm.

The end implies the evolution of a human-like creature, featuring probably my all time favorite pixel art piece. The demo ends with all of the earlier lifeforms passing through a portal of some sorts, read into it how you like. Perhaps a metaphor about the balance of nature. This is not a perfect demo, hardly any demo is, but it's so much more than the sum of its parts it might as well be, and deserves and eternal coup de cœur from me.